Halloween is easily the most fun holiday of the year. For adults it’s an opportunity to don a costume, head to a party, and get blitzed. Unless they have kids, because for kids it’s an opportunity to don a costume, fill bags with candy, and eat until the sugar rush turns into a crash. Since it is the State’s holy mission to turn nations into gigantic no-fun zones it’s no surprise that United States law enforcers are trying to make people fear Halloween.

The FBI has issued an alert to law enforcement about a possible “Halloween Revolt” by a dangerous anarchist group, an official has confirmed to CBS News.

Federal officials issued a bulletin to local police departments about the potential for attacks against their officers, CBS News has learned.

As first reported by the New York Post, a group known as the National Liberation Militia may be planning to dress in costume, cause a disturbance, and then ambush police who come to help. The Post reports the group has recommended members wear typical holiday masks and bring weapons like bricks and firearms.

Us anarchists have better things to do on Halloween than harass cops (you know, that whole donning a costume and getting blitzed thing). This fear mongering exists solely to feed the nonexistent war on cops. It gives local law enforcement justification to thump skulls, because anything they do is justifiable so long as they can claim they felt their safety was at risk, and the tough-on-crime crowd something to excuse acts of police brutality on.

Every year around this time the police try to scare parents about trick or treating. I’m pretty sure it’s either a ploy by law enforcers to reduce their work load by getting kids off of the street or make themselves look important to the safety of the community. This year police are again claiming that drug dealers are going to be handing out drugs to trick or treaters:

The Jackson, Miss. Police Department issued a warning for pressed Ecstasy pills that could be mistaken for Halloween candy if they ended up in children’s hands.

While stories of kids being given poisoned or tainted Halloween treats are mostly the stuff of urban legend, it’s always a good idea to check your child’s candy before letting them eat it.

Stuff of urban legend is right. Drug dealers aren’t fucking idiots. They’re in a business to make a profit. Ecstasy is a popular illicit drug, which means it commands a pretty penny. What drug dealer is going to hand out thousands of dollars in profit to a bunch of brats in costumes? If your neighborhood drug dealer is handing out anything to trick or treaters it’s going to be the same candy as everybody else.

Whenever the police try to drug up fear by insinuating somebody is going to do bad things to children ask yourself if the claim even makes sense. A drug dealer handing out ecstasy doesn’t make any goddamn sense so any warnings about it happen should be discarded.

Nursery school staff and registered childminders must report toddlers at risk of becoming terrorists, under counter-terrorism measures proposed by the Government.

The directive is contained in a 39-page consultation document issued by the Home Office in a bid to bolster its Prevent anti-terrorism plan.

[…]

The consultation paper adds: “Senior management and governors should make sure that staff have training that gives them the knowledge and confidence to identify children at risk of being drawn into terrorism and challenge extremist ideas which can be used to legitimise terrorism and are shared by terrorist groups.
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“They should know where and how to refer children and young people for further help.”

But concern was raised over the practicalities of making it a legal requirement for staff to inform on toddlers.

That is some beautiful fear mongering. Toddler terrorists! How could any other country come up with such a concept and be serious enough about it to use it as the basis for a law? Here you have children who have probably just mastered the fineries of bipedal motion and have just begun learning the very basics of arithmetic and the United Kingdom as managed to apply the very complex concepts of radicalization and terrorism to them! To top it all off it then legally required school teachers to do the same!

I’m sorry but that’s some advanced level shit right there. I think it’ll take some time before the politicians here even begin to approach this idea. They simply don’t have the cunning dear old mum does.

WASHINGTON – As our nation’s capital gets ready for its massive Fourth of July celebration, there are new warnings about a possible terror attack centered on Independence Day. The warning comes as thousands of people are expected to be on the National Mall this weekend.

The FBI, Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Center are all warning local law enforcement about a heightened concern involving possible terror attacks targeting the July 4th holiday. U.S. Park Police officials say they received the bulletin.

“We always take great care, we are constantly monitoring the updated security situation and we have a very robust security plan,” said Lt. Alan Griffith of the U.S. Park Police.

National security analysts say the warning is different and serious this year because of ISIS. They point to U.S.-based extremists who just this year launched attacks in Boston and Dallas and an arrest of a Virginia teenager for helping a friend join ISIS.

If you have any question what this is actually about this video clip explains it perfectly:

Did ISIS actually issue a threat or is this just another one of those “speculations based on unconfirmed reports from credible unspecified sources?” Who knows. It would be to ISIS’s benefit to issue such threats from time to time because they force the United States government to invest a lot of resources into investigating and preparing without actually costing ISIS anything. When you’re the smaller force in a conflict you need to expend as few resources as possible to get your opponent to invest as many resources as possible. If you succeed you wear them down and can ultimately achieve victory. On the other hand the government loves its “credible threats issued by unspecified sources.”

Either way the likelihood of an actual terrorist attack this weekend is basically zero. Don’t let yourself get caught up in the state’s fear mongering. Go out and enjoy yourselves, have a good time, and blow some shit up.

The politicians here in Minnesota have been pushing to raise gas taxes. Thanks to a recently release report on the condition of Minnesota’s bridges [PDF] the politicians have the justification they need to sucker people into accepting the increase. Without the increase in gas taxes, according to the politicians and the people who are stupid enough to believe them, dilapidated bridges won’t receive the repairs they need. But within the report a critical piece of information exists that seems to be getting ignored by the alarmists:

And a staggering 90 percent (750 total) of Minnesota’s 830 deficient bridges are maintained by local entities.

Herein lies the biggest problem. A vast majority of the bridges in need of repair are locally owned and maintained. That means local governments are responsible for raising the funding necessary to repair or replace those bridges. As the report notes the only other option these local entities have is to get down on their knees and beg federal and state governments for consideration in budgets they are unlikely to get:

In MAP-21, the current federal transportation law, Congress reduced access to dedicated funding for the repair of most locally-owned bridges. Although these bridges account for nearly 90 percent of all deficient bridges nationally, all dedicated federal bridge repair money now goes toward the ten percent of deficient bridges on the National Highway System (which do, admittedly, carry far more traffic each day.)

These locally-owned bridges provide essential links, and those who use them also deserve to be safe. Given the budget woes of so many local governments, there is little prospect of reducing the repair backlog absent federal or state assistance. As it stands now, however, these bridges are forced to compete with all other local priorities such as health care and public safety. At the state level, these bridges are often at the mercy of the budgeting process, and unless the state’s overall transportation budget grows through an increase in the gas tax or other funding sources, the condition of these bridges is unlikely to markedly improve in the coming years.

So the federal government only gives money for the maintenance of state-owned bridges and the state seldom provides local entities with assistance to repair or replace bridges. Supposedly increasing gas taxes will net more funding for local entities but I fail to see the logic in that conclusion. Especially when you consider how the state divvies up transportation funding:

In Minnesota, out of the $627 million on average spent annually on road expansion and repair from 2009-2011, only 40 percent ($250 million) went toward repair and maintenance.

The state appears to be more concerned with building new infrastructure than it is with maintaining what already exists. Unless somebody knows of some change in heart that exists at the state level I don’t know why anybody would believe additional gas taxes wouldn’t be used to increase expansion instead of maintenance.

What incentive does the state have to priorities local infrastructure over its own? Given the option of improving your home or your neighbor’s home what would you choose? Most people would choose to improve their own. For some reason people believe that the state is an exception to the self-interest inherent in humanity. It’s not. There is no reason to believe raising gas taxes would provide local governments with funding to improve their decaying bridges. And even if there was an assurance given by the state it could go unfulfilled or the conditions could be changed a year later. The biggest problem with political solutions is that they only last as long as the currently rulers. If the next set of rulers decide the last set’s policies were undesirable they will change them.

If you park somewhere illegally you can get booted or towed. It sucks when it happens because you end up paying out a sizable chunk of change most of the time. Unless you’re a cop. When you have a shiny liability badge and you park illegal you can arrest the person who booted your undercover car:

The lawsuit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, stems from a run-in that happened after the troopers, Sgt. Joseph Patout and Master Trooper Christopher Treadaway, parked a pickup with a Mississippi license plate in a lot across the street from Kyoto, a sushi bar on Prytania Street, and left it unattended for about 30 minutes.

The attendant, Brandon Hardeway, watched the troopers go into the Japanese restaurant, whose customers weren’t allowed to use the parking lot, and booted the pickup after allowing a grace period of several minutes, said Hardeway’s attorney, Isaac Soileau Jr.

“He felt pretty confident that he was doing the right thing when he booted it,” Soileau said of his client.

After leaving the restaurant, the troopers demanded that Hardeway remove the boot from their Dodge Ram pickup, saying they were undercover law enforcement officers, according to the lawsuit.

After checking with his employer, Premier Parking Enforcement, Hardeway told the troopers that the company “extended courtesy” to official vehicles used by New Orleans police as well as “other plainly marked emergency vehicles,” the lawsuit says. The company, also known as Boot Man Inc., did not make the same accommodation for unmarked State Police vehicles, “nor was it required to,” the lawsuit says.

After Hardeway told the troopers he wouldn’t remove the boot until they paid a $90 fee, the troopers told him he was “interfering with their official duties” and arrested him, the lawsuit says, handcuffing him and “forcing him into the back seat of a police vehicle.”

As they say, you can beat the charge but you can’t beat the ride. Even though state law doesn’t exempt undercover police cars from parking regulations the cops were able to kidnap the parking attendant, who was just doing his job I might add ironically, and are requiring him to suffer through the court system in order to get compensation.

Those shiny liability badges also ensure that the officers responsible for this mess will go unpunished. The lawsuit is against the Louisiana State Police, the two officers’ employer. Since the Louisiana State Patrol is tax payer funded the lawsuit, if successful, will do little more than return some of Premier Parking Enforcement’s stolen tax money. In all likelihood the two officers will go entirely unpunished. At most they may lose their jobs. But they certainly won’t be charged for unlawful kidnapping as they should be. Ignorance of the law isn’t an excuse — unless you have a badge.

It’s been a long heated debate between advocates of global warming climate change and those who don’t believe it’s occurring. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of scientific papers have been written address all angle of climate change. The renewable energy market has piles of papers proving climate change is real and the fossil fuel market has just as many say it’s not. But there is only one method we humans have for understanding the natural universe: democracy!

The Senate on Wednesday voted that “climate change is real and is not a hoax” as Democrats used the Keystone XL pipeline debate to force votes on the politically charged issue ahead of the 2016 elections.

The “hoax” amendment to the pipeline bill from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) passed 98-1, with only Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Republican campaign arm, voting “no.”

I’m glad we’ve finally put that issue to rest! But there are so many scientific debates that still need to be studied. Hopefully the Senate can find time to vote on whether evolution is real of a stupid theory put forth by atheists to explain their lack of belief in deities. After that the Senate could decide whether nor not gravity is real.

Are you scared of the Ebola virus yet? With how much media coverage is being given to the disease one would believe that it’s the next bubonic plague. A lot of people are worried about the disease spreading here and killing every man, woman, and child in the United States. But everybody should calm down. Ebola virus isn’t the death knell of the human race and would have a difficult time spreading through this country according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC):

No Ebola cases have been reported in the United States and the likelihood of this outbreak spreading outside of West Africa is very low. It’s more likely that the countries surrounding Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone may see cases because of the wide geographic spread of this outbreak.

While it’s possible that someone could become infected with the Ebola virus in Africa and then get on a plane to the United States, it’s very unlikely that they would be able to spread the disease to fellow passengers. The Ebola virus spreads through direct contact with the blood, secretions, or other body fluids of ill people, and indirect contact – for example with needles and other things that may be contaminated with these fluids. Most people who become infected with Ebola are those who live with and care for people who have already caught the disease and are showing symptoms.

Minneapolis is home of two extremely annoying groups: dumbass hipsters and control freaks. The former want to be special snowflakes and by doing so because conformists in the hipster culture while the latter want you to seek their personal approval for everything little thing you do.

Control freaks are interesting folk. They will go to pretty absurd lengths in their vain attempt to make the world how they believe it should be. Last night I had an unpleasant encounter with a control freak while riding the mean bike trails of Minneapolis. This person believed that everybody should ride bikes and he saw the barrier between reality and utopia being bicycle helmets. I know this because he bitched at me for my sin of wearing a helmet. In his twisted little world the act of wearing a bicycle helmet creates the appearance that bicycling is dangerous. By not wearing a helmet he believes bicycling would appear safer to non-bicyclists, which would convince them to become bicyclists.

This is one of the many reasons why I hate control freaks. No amount of dumbassery (you control freaks whining about how dumbassery isn’t a real world cannot see the middle finger that I’m holding up in your direction but know that it’s there) is beyond them if their crusade against those who dare do differently than them. Are not enough people riding bicycles? No problem, just have everybody put their lives at risk by not wearing a helmet so the activity appears to be safer! Because that will totally work.

Here’s the thing, I don’t care if you wear a helmet or not. I don’t even care if you ride a bike or not. Do whatever makes you happy in whatever manner makes you happy. But if asking people to put themselves in danger makes you happy I’m going to call you a dumbass.

As an unrelated side note I feel it is worth pointing out that the dumbass didn’t seem to notice the gun I was openly carrying. Unlike the boys over at Open Carry Texas I can open carry a gun without being an attention whore about it.